Moroccan identity, the Amazon Jews, and the shaping of Jewish identity in two authors, Brazilian Marcio Souza and Israeli Moïs Bennaroch

• In Event: The Jewish Moroccan Diaspora--ERETZ AMAZÔNIA, The Jews of the Amazon

Abstract

On the bicentenary of Moroccan immigration to Brazil, Brazilian novelist Marcio Souza published a play entitled Eretz Amazônia—the same title as a history book by Samuel Benchimol. It is Souza’s first “Jewish” work, after learning from the same Benchimol that he is a Jew--a Jew of both paternal and maternal Jewish lineages. Fourteen years earlier, in 2004, Souza had published an essay in which he admits that his family's Jewish memory was erased in favor of Catholic assimilation. At the time he already writes as a Jew, but it’s the 2018 play that first engages with the history, the languages, and the places of Moroccan Jews and their new life in the Amazon. His depiction of the Amazon environment and Amazon Jewish characters is here set in dialogue with that of Israeli poet and novelist Moïs Bennaroch, who engages with sites and sounds of the Moroccan diaspora especially in his Tetouan Trilogy. Born in Tetouan, Bennaroch sees himself in exile in Israel, and his own Moroccan character is a strong element shaping his Sephardic identity. Souza recovers his Jewish identity while Bennaroch affirms his multilingual and diasporic Jewish identity. By observing each author's depiction of the Moroccan diaspora in the Amazon, we follow how they draw the contours of their personal and collective Sephardic identity. Immigration, language and identity are central concerns in this paper.

Author

• Monique Rodrigues Balbuena, University of Oregon